I warned all my friends and colleagues who use Lenovos, and their answers were all the same. "Who'd be crazy enough to use the default install? First thing I did was (a fresh reinstall of Windows|install Linux)."
(Edit: Obviously this is not representative of the general population, and I didn't mean to suggest it was. I was just noting that my efforts to warn people about the untrustworthiness of Lenovo were thwarted because none of them trusted Lenovo to begin with, not for software at least, and that seemed interesting.)
This is repeatedly recommended, but I think it's overlooking that not all manufacturer customization is entirely evil. You then to hunt down all the drivers for bits of the motherboard. Are you sure your power consumption settings etc are optimal after you've done this? Have you installed all the drivers "manually" via their inf files? (e.g. Nvidia drivers come with their own pile of bloatware)
Lenovo does this for you with their system updater. It downloads and updates all drivers for your system, including bios updates and configuration tweaks that affect power and stability. It will install on a fresh install from Microsoft media - ie there is no need to keep what was preinstalled on the system. http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht080136
I don't use those because i don't trust the manufacturer-provided "system updater" to only download drivers. What's to prevent them from surreptitiously installing their add-on garbage.
Even if it currently does not do that, I just don't trust it to not do that in general.
The Lenovo one is a continuation of the IBM one. You get to tick what you want, they show what the existing installed version is, as well as changelogs. There has never been any misrepresentation. I believe corporate types use the system updater too, and pissing them off by installing garbage would quickly annoy valuable customers.
It does not let you install or update the crapware that comes with systems. It is actually quite difficult to get that stuff other than saving it when you get a new system. BTW IBM/Lenovo have historically had way less crapware than other vendors. I think Lenovo got complacent in this case, hearing "you guys do less crapware than the others" and confusing it with "you are doing a perfect job". Less worse is not the same as doing good.
Someone's useful add-on is someone else's garbage. They have some software called Access Connections which provides more gui and control over networking, such as which access points to connect to based on location profiles and who knows what else. I don't want that since I mostly use Linux, and Windows does a good enough job when I am using it. The system updater has never installed it, nor tricked me in any way.
Here's a fun surprise: Microsoft allows driver vendors to ship arbitrary programs in addition to drivers. They will download and install these programs automatically. For instance, I bought some "gamer" mouse because it was the closest thing to an Intellimouse 3 I could find. Suddenly I have a \Program Files\Razer directory, and a popup on install telling me to register and do all this other stuff.
So if Lenovo was evil, they can just ship shit in their drivers, get it certified by MS, and have it distributed automatically by Windows Update driver install.
For Lenovo you can download the SCCM package for the given model. Includes all necessary .inf files and does not install anything itself (designed for use in corporate deployments).
Yes, not all manufacturer customization is evil. But my point is that no one in my circle trusts the manufacturer enough to leave any of it on their machine.
I despise Lenovo. Purely from an engineering quality aspect, they aren't remotely close to IBM. I've been on the T440p for a year now, and I utterly hate using it. Every time I'm not docked, I'm really, really, annoyed. (Compared to feeling great when on the X201.)
But what am I gonna do? There's essentially no options to replace an old X-style ThinkPad. The newest Carbon X1 is as close as anything. Everyone else is moving to the Apple-style clickpad, which is unacceptable. HP and Dell sell mostly crap. Apple's devices are hot and unergonomic (apart from questionable Windows driver support).
So good luck not trusting them. And I doubt HP'd do any better.
The last Lenovo laptop I got came with Norton. I uninstalled that completely. Then I went to download Chrome which Norton decided to protect me from. Uninstall means different things, and they never uninstall completely/cleanly. In this Superfish example they would have left the dodgy certificates behind. The only way you know you have a good install is to do a clean install, rather than attempt surgery on the crap that got shipped.
Fortunately Lenovo do have a system updater that does a fantastic job on driver downloads etc.
Sometimes this is the only way to get CPU scaling to work properly, as the drivers for the laptop's particular quirky ACPI implementation may not be available sepatately. It's no fun having a clean system that either runs at 1999 speeds or burns a hole in your desk. Linux can be a bit better on some systems, but worse on others.
I'm still sticking to Windows 7, the Windows 7 OEM disks are now behind a barrier which requires you to put in a valid key only from certain retailers.
Yes and no. There is at least one case that I can remember[0] of pirated software being modified to download and install a virus.
According to Microsoft[1], 32% of pirated Windows 7 copies and activation cracks resulted in some sort of malware infection
Speaking anecdotally, most of the friends and family whose computers I've had to clean up have been running some sort of cracked/pirated software that they'd downloaded or had been given to them by a friend
Piracy is actually quite hard on Windows 8+. The way it is licensed is way different from the past and the current circumvention methods require repeated reactivation and break a lot.
Note: I do own Windows 8.1 Pro, so don't think this is based on my experience pirating the software. I merely have examined the licensing system for some software I was writing.
With Macs you have multiple options. The first being much easier than a typical Windows PC.
1) Boot into Recovery mode (Cmd + R), then use Internet Recovery [1] to install OS X. This works even if your HDD or SSD is completely blank. All Macs from around mid-2010 onwards are supported. [2]
2) Download the latest OS X installer from the Mac App Store, then either use the bundled 'createinstallmedia' command-line app to create a bootable USB flash drive [2] or a third-party app called DiskMaker X [3].
Apple provides Recovery Disk Assistant, which is more or less the same thing.
Also, when the SSD in my Macbook Air failed, I was able to netboot their internet recovery thing, which let me install OS X on a USB3 hard drive. Pretty cool.
Apple provides Recovery Disk Assistant, which is more or less the same thing.
I see. They have that stuck into Disk Utility now. One point to Apple.
Disk Utility is a bit kludgy nowadays, though, and it seems they're not doing as good a job as MS publicizing the tool. (Too small a sample size here, but I ran across the MS tool by accident while searching/browsing. With Apple, a human had to tell me.)
You live in a bubble. There are plenty of people who use Lenovo products that are not tech people. By saying this, even though you don't intend to, you are minimizing the effect of this and being an apologist for lenovo.
An intellectual should always be wary of semantic equivalents to, "You're either for us, or against us." In greatest part, because this is one of the major symptoms that one's consciousness is partly clouded by group psychology.
I don't like the attitude that if there's a problem, you aren't allowed to say anything along the lines of "here's something that makes it less of a problem than it might be".
(Edit: Obviously this is not representative of the general population, and I didn't mean to suggest it was. I was just noting that my efforts to warn people about the untrustworthiness of Lenovo were thwarted because none of them trusted Lenovo to begin with, not for software at least, and that seemed interesting.)